Music streaming to go high-res with Tidal overseas

Prefer CDs and music of a higher bitrate than what the traditional streaming service puts out? You’re going to love what’s coming.

Announced this week for overseas market, Swedish company Aspiro AB will be bringing a dash of high-resolution audio to those of you with mobie bandwidth to spare, streaming FLAC files to your phone with a better music quality than what other streaming services offer.

The service is called “Tidal,” and will launch to the UK and US markets first, after what appears to be a successful test run of a similar service by a company collaborating with Aspiro, Wimp, which ran its own version of Tidal under the name WiMP HiFi.

In the UK and US, Tidal will cost $19.99 GBP and $19.99 USD respectively, offering high-resolution streams and downloads for audio, while music videos will be sent in HD format.

GadgetGuy has this week confirmed that while the service will be launching internationally, Australia won’t be one of the places it will be coming too first.

That said, a representative for the company has told us that while it won’t be officially launched here, that Australians would be able to access the service, even though it would be tailored to a US and UK perspective “when it comes to catalogue and editorial profile.”

It’s not unusual for Australia to get some of these services a little later, so we’re not totally surprised here.

We have had decent luck in recent years, though, with streaming audio solutions managing to get their products available in Australia ahead of other parts of the world. Pandora’s release in Australia is one such example, as right now at the time of publishing, it was still only available to America, New Zealand, and Australia.

With that in mind, it’s possible that Tidal will, at one point, bring its high-res streaming system to Australia, but we can only imagine it will need a bunch of people ready to jump on the HRA bandwagon, which is still, in fairness, in its infancy locally.

While Sony has tried to get the high-res thing going with its Android-based Walkman, and LG’s G2 and G3 smartphone support FLAC in 192/24, as well as quite a few headphones, high-resolution audio is still an area most people aren’t touching.

But if you’re an early adopter and are already there, you need to know that some providers are thinking about it, and it shouldn’t be too much longer until locals get to have their own taste of the high-res pie.